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Just in front of the Platia Elefterias in Iraklion, the island capital of Crete, is a strange sculpture. Three badly smashed cars sit there, in a circle of tape, the kind used to rope off accidents. The sculpture falls somewhere between a stark reminder of \'momento mori\' and a joke, a questioning of what can truly be called art. But this is a question that so much modern art poses, that you shrug it off, just another take on life - or death - just another angle. Not so however, in Iraklion\'s Archaeological Museum. There, you are presented with tantalising fragments left by the Minoans, a civilisation so truly ancient, (from circa 2000 - 1450 BC) that you feel, along with the rest of what comprises the 21st century, like a very brash and ignorant newcomer to this planet. In the upstairs rooms the walls are covered with large frescos. What was actually discovered of these Minoan paintings were only fragments, but these have been completed, to accord with the vision of what they would have looked like. But it is, as the guide says \'ein Fantasie\'. What they actually looked like \'wir wissen nicht\' - we do not really know. We do know however, that \'die Minoische Leute liebten das Meer, uber alles.\' She is pointing to the dolphin fresco, as she describes their love of the sea.. So a relatively modern imagination has been used to complete the fragments and we see delicate branches of olive trees painted in blues and greens, dark-haired women against a blue background and the most famous, the Prince of the Lilies, one hand stretched behind him. Perhaps, as the guide says, he is leading a steer, perhaps the bull whose horned head forms the adjacent fresco, with body painted in, imagined. In this pose, the bull\'s head is turned around, as if he is refusing to go in the direction he is being led. But that is pure speculation. If the Prince of the Lilies is leading a bull, he faces forward, there is nothing to suggest a stubborn or recalcitrant steer behind him, he faces forward, full of confidence and vigour, the muscles of his chest and forearms clearly showing he is male, despite the pale pinkish hue of the fresco, a colour that usually represents the female form. Or rather, white usually does. While red shows male bodies. But perhaps this was once red and has faded to the palest of pink. His elaborate head-dress curls into the shapes of lilies, which gives him his name. Dolphins, goddesses seated on rocks, a wide-horned bull, bull-leapers, sacred winged griffins and the Prince of Lilies. Downstairs, carved and painted pots and storage jars, bronze and ceramic figurines, gods and goddesses, crowned, some with arms upheld, one, most notably, with writhing snakes in her hands. Our ignorance I feel, is to do with what life is really about. It is to do with the fact that we have forgotten, or so it seems, how to deeply engage with life. We walk through the Archaeological Museum at Iraklion, to be given reminders of the art and beauty, the imagery and imagination of a people who loved life so much, it overflowed into their paintings. Thousands of years later, we gaze at these depictions of ceremony, serenity and fantasy - gaze and speculate, then retire to sit in the paved Platia Elefterias, fronted by crumpled cars. Later, I walk down to the sea, where the harbour is lined with fishing boats. A fisherman sits sewing a heap of yellow net. Further out, walking past the old Venetian fort, the waves slap against the sea wall. Just as I walk past, one particularly large wave tosses spray over the wall, drenching me. I feel privileged that this sea, so beloved of the Minoans, has singled me out for its salty embrace. I drip sea water as I walk back past the bobbing boats. * * * My feet ache, from walking the streets of Iraklion. I began at the bus station, after getting off the bus from Malia. I walk round by the sea a little way, then up Avgoustou and find the church of Ayios Titos on my left. Inside the church, the inner area is screened off, but in the front part, I light a slender bee-brown candle and say a prayer. I then walk through the pedestrian area - Dedhalou - to the Platia Elefterias, where I find a sunny bench and eat a spinach pastry. Later, I head back down Dedhalou to the Platia Venizelou. A Greek man stops in the street, stares at me, says something I do not understand, then kalimera, which I do. Kalimera I reply. I continue a short way to El Greco park where I sit in the sun and write some postcards. I then head back along Avgoustou and veer slightly to the left, to go through the market and continue on to one of the old gates of the city, where Kazantzakis\' tomb is to be found. At least, I think I find it, after wandering through leafy green areas, a sudden quiet, a children\'s play area. Heading back down Avgoustou I pass a fruit and vegetable shop. I stop and buy a pomegranate. I\'m reading Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace, where that myth is explored and the significance of the pomegranate seeds swells into a size that encompasses both hemispheres of our Western minds, the origin perhaps, of our struggle with polarity, with life and death, summer and winter, presence and absence. The pomegranate I buy has both blush and paleness on its skin, both fever and fear, both ripeness and loneliness. It also has a tiny sprig of leaves at the top. Its symbolism is so profound and so intense, that it had to be bought. I pulled it out of myth into something very personal. There was a pomegranate tree growing in the yard outside the Tirana office where I worked last year. Elona said to me - we\'ll eat them, when they are ripe. But I had to leave suddenly, earlier than expected, and I didn\'t get to eat the fruit. I am making up for that now. Or so I tell myself. At this moment, I am not convinced that I will eat it. It looks too serene, too compact, too unassailable, too strong to be broken open, split apart, dismembered. I am not at all sure that I can do it. Did Hades split the fruit for Persephone before she ate the seeds? He must have. Perhaps that was his first violation - or his only one - after that, there was the sweet taste of compliance, the red juice, the flavour of what was still to come - Perhaps the splitting of the pomegranate was the symbol of what happens when the blush and pallor of resistance is cracked open, revealing the contradictory nature of desire - its chills and fevers, its winters and summers, its yes and its no - one god and goddess more would not really matter to us, but a legacy of polarities is what we have inherited. So it becomes another Eden myth, not so much a failure as a split, a life lived in paradox, that cannot be resolved. As I walk through the streets of Iraklion, I feel that the vestiges of guilt and anxiety, so prevalent in the north, drop from my shoulders like loose feathers. This is simply the way it is and should be - there is no duality at all here. This is the gift of the land perhaps, expressed by the Minoans in their paintings and their pottery and their graceful bull-leaping. They knew that life itself was sacred. There was no split in them. But something happened. In the Historical Museum, the figures of the icons of the Byzantine era have become rigid, still, contained and stern. Life does not flow through their limbs and their gestures, as it does with the Minoan figures. There is
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